ACE Weekly Report: 07-19-00 All ACE spacecraft subsystems are performing nominally. An Attitude maneuver was successfully executed on 07-18-00. The next attitude maneuver is scheduled for 07-28-00. DSN has placed its plans to transfer its overseas sites to the 26 Meter Automated System on hold until the various Projects have verified the equipment. ACE scheduled a test support for Day 195 with Station 66 (Madrid). The station used the 26 Meter Automated System for the support. The legacy equipment was available in the event of any problems; its data was recorded on the CDR. During the support two instances of corrupted data of ~1 second duration were seen. As a result numerous critical flags were triggered in the MOC. The FOT has examined the legacy system CDR file and the critical flags are not set; only with the data from the 26m automated system are the critical parameters flagged. Further investigation is on-going. Two major solar flares occurred last week: an X1.9 on July 12 at 10:18 UT and an X5.7 on July 14 at 10:03 UT. As a result, the SIS instrument reached saturation and had to be commanded to raise its thresholds. This action brought the detector out of saturation. Also, the CRIS instrument's safeguarding kicked in to protect it. Both these instruments will be commanded this week to return them to a nominal state. On 07-17-00 SSR B's telemetry sections were scrolled through; no Single Bit Errors (SBE) were found. On 07-14-00 the SEPICA instrument was automatically ramped down by the S3DPU. The solar storms are not suspected to have caused this since this particular anomaly has happened in the past and during quiet solar periods. The anomaly can be explained by the fact that SEPICA is, "...operating at the edge of its performance capability" according to Mark Popecki of the Instrument team. The instrument was slowly ramped up during the next several days and is back at its pre-ramp down state. Plans to redirect data to spare memory have still not been scheduled. On 07-16-00 Station D66 transmitter went red for ~54 minutes during the support. The Ops Chief extended the support and all commanding was successfully completed; all SSR data was recovered [DR# L04545]. While DSN has placed its plans to transfer its overseas sites to the 26 Meter Automated System on hold, the Goldstone site [D16] 26 Meter automated system has been made operational. ACE's first support on the operational automated system at D16 was scheduled for 07-18-00. While telemetry was being received, the MOC was unable to send commands to the s/c at BOT. While the station attempted various solutions, including an exciter failover and a TCP reboot, the problem continued. At BOT + 1 hour the s/c automatically reconfigured itself for the low (434 bps) data rate; telemetry went static. The FOT informed the station of the reconfiguration and requested they reconfigure for the low rate data. At that time the stationed informed the FOT that they did not have ACE's low data rate in their 'desktop'. The FOT then requested D16 configure to the legacy system. After ~36 minutes telemetry was again received in the MOC. After an additional 22 minutes D16 informed the FOT that ACE was go for commanding on the legacy system. The Ops Chief extended the support by one hour. The FOT began the nominal ACE activities; an attitude maneuver was successfully executed. Due to the problems at D16, there was insufficient time to complete the SSR dump. The remaining portion of the SSR was dumped during the following support, prior to commencing the nominal SSR activities. During the debrief at the end of activities the station informed ACE that a DC voltage offset on the command line between station 16 and the ground antenna is believed to be the cause of the command problems.